Adobe and Zend Technologies, the PHP distribution company, are announcing Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP software, a new integrated product aimed at helping PHP developers create rich Internet applications for mobile, Web and desktop leveraging the Flash Platform.

Zend, which has been working with Adobe since 2008, offers its own distribution of PHP, the popular open-source scripting language for Web applications, and sells software and support services around the language.

The Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP gives developers a single code base for applications for Android, Blackberry Tablet OS and iOS while sharing code from Web applications. Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP includes an integrated copy of Zend Studio 8, which allows developers to develop Flash based applications within a single environment. Specifically, the integrated software offers a single UI framework to create Flex and PHP projects for desktop and mobile and the ability to connect to PHP services and generate ActionScript value objects.

The combination of the two frameworks in one suite is powerful, says Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. Adobe says that more than 131 million smartphones are expected to have Flash Player installed by the end of the year. And PHP is the leading language for public facing web applications, says Gutmans.

This could be interesting… I still think Adobe sat on it’s dominance with Flash far too long and let other companies / technologies catch up.

The company is hosting the SVG Open 2009 conference that begins Friday to dig into a standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that can bring the technology to the Web. With growing support from browser makers, an appetite for vector graphics among Web programmers, and new work under way to make SVG a routine part of the Web, the technology has its best chance in years at becoming mainstream.

New Web programming standards are hard to nurture, but they do arrive, said Brad Neuberg, a Google programmer and speaker at the conference.

"First they’re ignored, then they’re hyped, then they’re written off for dead, then they start getting real work done," Neuberg said.

Vector graphics describe imagery mathematically with lines, curves, shapes, and color values rather than the grid of colored pixels used by bitmapped file formats such as JPEG or GIF widely used on the Web today. Where appropriate, such as with corporate logos but not photographs, vector graphics bring smaller file sizes and better resizing flexibility. That’s good for faster downloads and use on varying screen sizes.

But SVG has yet to catch on widely in Web programming circles, in part because the dominant Web browser, Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer, can’t handle them. "It’s hard to deploy this when you can’t use it on most of the installed base," Neuberg said.

Google and various allies are working to change that–its Chrome browser along with Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera support SVG–and judging by the arrival of Microsoft as a gold sponsor of the conference, things could be turning around.

Other signs: vector graphics topped the list of desired new features in a Web programmer survey. And that result helped encourage Google to release a preview version of software called SVG Web that brings SVG support to browsers that lack it.

SVG Web can hand off SVG chores to browsers that support the standard. For those that don’t, it runs a Flash program to handle rendering, Neuberg said. "It will never match the performance of native support. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it does help developers and users deploy content," he said.

See the full article at CNET News.

But they increasingly agree on one thing: a standard for online video called Adobe Flash.

Flash was once known primarily as the technology behind those niggling Web ads in the 1990s that gyrated and flickered on the screen. Today, it is a ubiquitous but behind-the-scenes Web format used to display Facebook applications, interactive ads and, most notably, the video on sites like YouTube and Hulu.com.

Now Adobe Systems, which owns the technology and sells the tools to create and distribute it, wants to extend Flash’s reach even further. On Monday, Adobe’s chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, will announce at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas that Adobe is extending Flash to the television screen. He expects TVs and set-top boxes that support the Flash format to start selling later this year.

For consumers, what sounds like a bit of inconsequential Internet plumbing actually means that a long overhyped notion is a step closer to reality: viewing a video clip or Internet application on a TV or mobile phone.

For Hollywood studios and other content creators, a single format for Web video is even more enticing. It means they can create their entertainment once in Flash — as the animated documentary “Waltz With Bashir,” from Sony Pictures Classics, was made — and distribute it cheaply throughout the expanding ecosystem of digital devices.

“Coming generations of consumers clearly expect to get their content wherever they want on it, on any device, when they want it,” said Bud Albers, the chief technology officer of the Disney Interactive Media Group, who will join Adobe executives at the convention to voice Disney’s support for the Flash format. “This gets us where we want to go.”

See the full article at the NY Times.

MLB.com no longer uses Microsoft’s Silverlight to stream games to its 500,000 subscribers. This season fans will watch live and on-demand video via Adobe‘s Flash player.

In November, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the league’s tech unit, announced it would discontinue using Silverlight, the browser plug-in that MLBAM had signed up for barely a year earlier. The decision was not insignificant. MLBAM not only runs the profitable MLB.com streaming-video service, the Web’s most successful subscription service, but the group is also influential with other leagues and sporting events. MLBAM handles much of the back-end operations for CBS‘ Webcasts of the NCAA Basketball Tournament and this year will do the encoding for the 2009 Masters golf tournament.

Baseball never detailed the reasons for dropping Silverlight but sources close to the negotiations between the league and Microsoft said it was a series of glitches and conflicts between the companies that led to the split.

Read the full article at CNET News.

On Wednesday, embedded software specialist Bsquare plans to detail its work in the area. "Bsquare has been tapped by a global tier 1 carrier to port the Adobe Flash player to the Android platform on more than 100 embedded devices," according to a message sent to reporters about the news.

Flash is a software foundation that’s popular for games, video streaming, and other more sophisticated Web site features, but it’s mostly a fixture on PCs rather than mobile devices. Apple’s iPhone, the technological leader among smartphones by many accounts, doesn’t support Flash.

Google Android leader Andy Rubin demonstrated Flash on the T-Mobile G1 Android phone at an Adobe conference in November.

See the original article at Webware.

HP SWFScan decompiles Flash applications and searches the code for vulnerabilities and violations of Adobe’s best security practices guidelines, said Billy Hoffman, manager of HP’s Web Security Research Group. The tool works with all versions of Flash.

With the Flash Player installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers globally, Flash applications are a popular target for attackers. HP analyzed nearly 4,000 Web apps developed with the Flash platform and found that 35 percent violate Adobe’s security best practices.

For example, encryption keys and other sensitive data have been found inside client-side Flash code, Hoffman said.

Flash, traditionally used for creating animation and games, has been increasingly used for Web 2.0 apps destined for enterprise use, for which tighter security measures are required, he said.

Hoffman explains how a Flash app vulnerability can be exploited in this video.

This isn’t the first tool aimed at Flash developers. IBM last month announced its Rational AppScan, which automatically scans Flash and Ajax-based applications for security defects. The standard version of that product costs $17,550 for a one-year license.

Last year, HP was called upon by Microsoft to develop a free tool, Scrawlr, that developers can use to test for SQL injection vulnerabilities in apps on Microsoft’s ASP platform, according to Hoffman.

While developers are striving to write more secure Flash apps, Adobe occasionally is forced to deal with security holes in the Flash Player itself. For instance, Adobe recently issued a patch for a hole in the player that could allow an attacker to remotely take control of a computer.

See the original article at CNET News.

Loudcrowd wants to create the feel of an online concert or dance club for users. The site will feature social games that will be played simultaneously with music tracks as well as daily playlists from guest DJs. Loudcrowd’s feature Dance game is similar to the popular game Dance, Dance Revolution and is pretty innovative. Loudcrowd says that the dance game has been played more than one million times since they entered private beta, with over 25 percent of users visiting the site more than 100 times a month. The games are all built on Flash and the animation is disarmingly good.

See the full article at TechCrunch.